This has always been a goal for Arctic. Most direct links to videos will play in the feed without issue. There is also a setting in the Media options to embed YouTube videos, this is not very reliable and will fail on a lot of videos. There is another option to convert YouTube videos to Piped, this tends to work better, but can also fail. YouTube specifically is a struggle do to how much effort they put into preventing 3rd party access to content.

Now for videos posted directly to lemmy, they are re-encoded as vp9 and packaged in a mp4. Now this is a big issue for Apple devices. vp9 is the same encoding used for webm, and for whatever reason, apple does not offer any decoders for this format except in Safari, or if you’re YouTube. I’ve looked into integrating VLCKit to play these videos, I may end up adding this as an option, but it’ll be bad for battery life. It would be nice if we could get videos in a different format. Even if we could get an HLS stream in the same format, apple devices have no problem playing vp9 if its in a HLS stream.

A little update on this, I spent most of yesterday working on theme support, and I made a lot of progress. I have everything working, just a few details left to polish, and some work left on the editor.

It’s written in Swift. Originally I had planned to write it in Go, but I decided to try out Swift as a backend since I had never used Swift for web development. This allows me to share the same Lemmy API library and networking between both Arctic, and it’s notification server.

Exactly, I was actually planning to add a theme browser. I’m going to setup a service on Arctic’s website to host themes. Then you’ll be able to browse community themes in Arctic, and install them. I’ll also setup a community for arctic themes, so users can share their themes with screenshots etc.

That’s great to hear, and I hope you’re enjoying Arctic so far. I actually started out using Memmy as well, it was one of the first apps available with a good set of features. I hadn’t realized that support had ended for the project though, That’s a shame.

I hadn’t really thought about it before, But it only took about 5 minutes to add support for a lighter variant of dark mode. I’ll include this in the next release.

I am however working on customizable theme support. It’ll allow for creating custom themes and changing just about any color you want in the app. This is taking me some time to build though, and it likely won’t be ready for a while.

My pleasure! I did not plan on such a long list of changes, I got a little carried away. I had a list of issues I had noticed over the last couple of months, and I was just planning to address those with this update. After such a long break from the project, I wasn’t in a huge rush to release this update. That gave me the time to work on bigger features like Mac support, and embedded content.

Always a pleasure, I’m excited to be working on Arctic again after such a long break!

To be fair, that feature list was completed before the surgery. I just had surgery on Monday. I figure if I’m going to be mostly bed bound for the next month, I could put that to some use and work on Arctic.

I definitely burnt myself out towards the beginning of summer, that’s what started my taking a break from development. Then between work, summer heat, and my injury, it took me a while to get back into the groove.

Sorry, it was late when I replied and I didn’t notice exactly what you were referring to. I got sidetracked by the post not showing for you.

This is about the link preview in the post not being blurred. This is not exactly a bug. The issue with blurring content in comments is that there is no way to mark a comment or a link as NSFW on Lemmy. What I could do is add an option to blur all links and images in comments on NSFW posts. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought of this scenario before.

I did some work on this issue last night. I improved the logging a bit so that the error message actually shows the failure reason provided by lemmy rather than just the generic network error.

As for the issue, I can’t seem to track down why that would have happened. I’m on lemmy.world as well, and I have no issue uploading images. I ran some tests today, and I was able to upload some large images. There are some dimension restrictions as well of (10,000 x 10,1000) and (40,000px).

Do you happen to be using a VPN? I know lemmy.world had disabled uploads when using a VPN to help with illegal content being uploaded. If not, then there must be some issue I’m not noticing / experiencing and I’ll have to look into it further.

I did take a long break from Arctic development over the summer and I’m just getting back into it over the last couple of weeks. I’m excited to be back at it, and thankfully the surgery is not too much of an interruption so I can use some of my time off to push out some updates.

That’s possible, it could have just as easily been due to the maintenance I was on the notification server the last few days. I had the server offline several times during maintenance. I believe it is working as expected now.

No worries about the late response, hope you’re feeling better!

Sorry, I noticed this post a little late. I usually get notifications for new posts here, but I believe I was doing maintenance on the notification server when you posted this.

Anyway, it looks like you figured this out already. I would love to include an option to toggle this account setting in Arctic, however it goes against the AppStore regulations. I’m allowed to have a toggle for client side filtering and blurring, but not for changing the account setting. I’ll see about adding a status message in settings to notify users if NSFW content is disabled on their account.

The new TestFlight build is out now, I probably won’t be making a post about it until tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know.

Could you elaborate on the issue you are having with message notifications? I updated the notification server, so it is possible I broke something without noticing. I am actually using a separate server for internal testing of notifications, so there may be an issue with the production server that I am not aware of.

Thanks for letting me know, I’ll look into this and roll out a hotfix as soon as I can. Looks like we are both on the same instance, so it should be quite easy to debug the issue.

I had surgery today, so the update may take a couple of days. I’m not yet sure how the medication is going to affect my ability to focus.

I need to go through this update and do some more testing. I rushed the release a little more than I had hoped so I could try and get the update out before the TestFlight build expired, so I didn’t test it as well as I usually do.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know about this, I’ll let you know as soon as I roll out the next build.

My pleasure! I’m not exactly sure what is going on here, I submitted a new build to TestFlight 2 days ago, and it’s still waiting for review. I’ve always had really good luck with the review processes and it’s usually approved within an hour or so even with AppStore releases. I’m hoping it’ll be approved sometime today since the weekend is over.

I was really pushing to have the update ready before this happened, but I was not expecting such a long wait for review.

Anyway as others have pointed out, you can switch to the AppStore version without loosing any settings. Keep your eye out, I’ll be posting here when the new TestFlight version is live.

That is fair. There is a setting Settings > Appearance > Show Links In Comment which allows you to disable link previews in the comments section.

I do my best to fix issues as they are noticed, and I take all the feedback I can get. However, like you said, there is a much smaller following here than there is for apps like Voyager and Mlem, so I don’t get nearly as much feedback as I would like.

Being on an iPhone X makes sense. The iPhone X still had real force touch unlike all the newer phones which do not have pressure sensitive screens, and instead use a long-press for Haptic Touch. This should help in figuring out the issue you are having with links.

In Arctic tapping the active tab will scroll to the top, or act as a back gesture if you are already at the top. This was a feature that was requested early on from users coming over from Apollo, and missing that feature. I could definitely add an alternative option like this though.

It’s not abandoned. I had a very busy summer and did not have much time to work on it. I’m back at it now and I have a couple big updates coming over the next few weeks. Things should start picking up around here again. I plan to get back to weekly updates, I also have some time off from work next month so updates may be more frequent during that time.

Yes, I’m I’m working on finalizing some of the new features and bug fixes so I can push out the next release. If needed, I’ll disable some of the new features so I can push out a working build while I continue to work on them. Either way, I’ll have an update out before it expires.